The Realization, 1917–24

The October Revolution was a gamble, an enormous leap into the dark. Towards the end of his life, Lenin admitted that he had undertaken it in the spirit of Napoleon — ‘ On s’engage et puis … on voit .’ It was a Marxist leap of course, yet a Marxist leap of a very peculiar kind; and in another remarkable admission Lenin would concede that the Bolsheviks had ‘started from the opposite end to that prescribed by theory’. 1 The western path to socialism by way of capitalism and bourgeois democracy was not a path to be followed inflexibly, and Russian circumstances had required something different. Far from waiting for the socio-economic and cultural conditions necessary for socialism to ripen, the Bolsheviks had taken power with the aim of hastening the maturation process. The political revolution, which should have come as the culmination of the process of change leading to socialism, had thus occurred in advance of the conditions which should have created it. ‘Things have turned out differently from what Marx and Engels expected, and we, the Russian working and exploited classes, have the honour of being the vanguard of the international socialist revolution …’ 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.